Heat energy leaps through empty space, thanks to quantum weirdness

A surprising new study shows that heat energy can leap across a few hundred nanometers of a complete vacuum, thanks to a quantum mechanical phenomenon called the Casimir interaction. Though this interaction is only significant on very short length scales, it could have profound implications for the design of computer chips and other nanoscale electronic components where heat dissipation is key, while upending what many of us learned about heat transfer in high school physics.

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